Today, the information age is upon us and information is easily accessible to individuals. However, it is the organization of this information that usually defines whether or not it has a basis in practical use. Program information is accessible to individuals through the use of TVs, Convergence PCs, PC/TVs, PCs, or even set top boxes for cable ready TVS, and is organized, many times, in a disorderly manner. Television guides have been used extensively throughout the existence of TVs and have provided the user with information about programs to be aired. The guides are normally printed on a weekly basis and contain program information like the day, date, time, and a brief description of the programs. Additionally, the guides may provide information like whether the program is closed captioned for the hearing impaired or if the program is broadcast with foreign subtitles. In the advent of cable television, paper TV guides have become less desirable due to the fact that different cable companies assign different channel numbers for the same network names. For instance, cable company A provides a cable service with ESPN (ESPN is a trademark of ESPN, Inc.) airing on channel 47, while cable company B provides a cable service with ESPN airing on channel 32. This difference leaves a void in the consistency of assigning channel numbers to the networks aired and thus leaves the consumer at a loss when trying to access the program scheduling information contained in paper-based or printed TV Guides. As a solution, cable companies have provided program guides aired on a specific channel with the guide displaying a list of the channels provided by the cable company and a chronology of current program information for each of the channels.
Program guides currently provided by cable companies possess several intrinsic problems created in the presentation and accessibility of the program information. The guides provide program information in a grid that lists all of the networks by channel number, in several time slots, covering a varying time period. As one can imagine, an EPG may become very lengthy, displaying entries 30 minutes apart for each network. The number of cells required vastly exceeds the amount of room available for displaying the information on a TV or PC monitor. Therefore, the user is left with navigating through an excessive amount of program cells in an effort to locate the desired program information. Often, this leaves the user disoriented with no sense of origin within the guide. Also, current EPGs do not provide user selectable cells allowing easy access to programs being broadcast or to additional information available to the user, such as websites etc.
A further shortcoming of present EPGs is that the user is unable to view the program information for only one network. For example, suppose a user wanted to locate a program airing on “FOX” (FOX is a trademark of 20th Century Fox Film Corporation) but was unsure of the date and time the program aired. The user would have to scroll through each of the time slots for all of the networks until the program name appeared in the EPG. This further disorients the user as the user attempts to find the desired program information. Through current guides not providing program information by network and not having a fixed length, like the seven days of a typical TV guide, current program guides fall short of providing the user a non-disorienting guide displaying program information.
Therefore, what is needed is a system, method, interface, software, and signal to display an electronic program guide including program information arranged by network.